Stephen Warren had hoped the flames from the Eaton fire wouldn't reach his street in Altadena.
The blaze, which started on January 7 amid fierce winds, was still quite a way from the community and seemed to be moving in a different direction as he and others monitored it that night.
But as he prepared for bed, he grew worried.
Warren, a building inspector who lives on and manages a property on Acacia Street with three houses for the owners, told the owner's daughter that she should leave just in case.
"Around 10:30, I started noticing it getting closer, and I said, 'Oh my gosh, I think it's going to hit this way,'" Warren, 49, told Newsweek.
Just a few hours later, at around 3:30 a.m, the smell of smoke roused him from sleep. "I get up and I go because the smoke was too much to handle at that time," he said.
Though evacuation orders had been issued around that time, Warren said he didn't receive any alerts on his phone.
He left, parked his car near a highway off-ramp and watched as the fire quickly spread. "It was moving so fast. It covered miles and miles in what felt like 30 minutes."
Just before 7 a.m., Warren decided to head back.
Nothing prepared him for what he saw.
"Apocalyptic is the only word I could think of," he said. "I'm driving down our street, and there's just house after house after house on fire … And I rush to get to our place, and there's downed power lines laying in the street, and I'm just like, 'I don't care. I'm going over them.'"
For the next three or so hours, Warren sprayed down everything he could using two hoses.
"The sky was red. It was just red, and … I'm spraying literal embers out of the sky. They were not small. They were like, big pieces of wood that had burned so they were really lightweight now, and they were just carrying with this wind.
"I've got my mask on, I'm being, like, blown over on the roof constantly, because the gusts are so big, and I'm trying to shoot all these ashes out of the air," he said. "And then I'm jumping down, spraying the ground because it's full of ash, trying to save as much as I can."
He added: "It's not just me. I'm looking down, probably four doors down from me to the right, and they're fighting fires on the corner down there."
Then at around 10:30 a.m., the winds shifted and Warren decided he needed to leave.
'This might be my only chance to get out'
"I had to leave at that point because it was pitch black," he said. "I couldn't even see anymore. I jumped in my car because I'm thinking, this might be my only chance to get out of here."
He returned at around 3 p.m. that day, walking because the roads had now been blocked off. "I ended up staying there and putting out more of the ash," he said.
Firefighters are continuing to battle the Eaton fire and the larger Palisades fire, which have killed more than two dozen people, burned about 38,000 acres and destroyed more than 14,000 structures since January 7. The Eaton fire was 81 percent contained by Sunday evening, while the Palisades fire was 56 percent, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Many homes in Altadena have been leveled by the Eaton fire, but the houses Warren manages are still standing.
"We lost a bunch of trees because of the wind, but the three houses were all intact," he said.
"The area we were in, everything seemed to make it through. So maybe it had something to do with the amount of water we were spraying. I don't know," he said. "My neighbor thinks it was, hey, you were a big part why this whole section wasn't on fire."
The owners of the property declined to comment to Newsweek, but Warren said they are extremely grateful for his actions.
"They've sent me messages saying they're so grateful that they brought me on," he said of the family, who are in San Diego.
Still, Warren, who is staying temporarily in Glendale, wishes he could have done more.
"I've lived in California my whole life. I always see fires, but I'm usually a city person, so you rarely see anything in the cities. It's always out in the in the rural areas," he said.
"I couldn't sleep for several days after," he added. "It constantly keeps replaying in my head. Even last night, I started thinking about, gosh, if I only knew, if I would have stayed, I could have gone to the neighbor's place, put their backyards out … I already know in the future what I'm going to be buying for supplies so it will never happen like this again."
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